Censoring Valentina Lisitsa shames the Toronto Symphony Orchestra

The arts like to pride themselves on being "challenging". They "speak truth to power" – meaning not just political power, but the power of received, lazy ways of thinking and feeling. People in the arts are the ones who swim against the current, embrace unfashionable causes, and stare the uncomfortable truths of human nature and society in the face.

An incident in Toronto has proved how hollow that boast is. It shows that the moment a serious challenge to the polite norms of society arise, people in the arts are just as likely to turn tail and run as anyone else. It concerns Valentina Lisitsa, a Ukrainian pianist who in 1991 emigrated to America. She’s risen from total obscurity in her twenties, when she earned her living as a teacher and jobbing pianist, to something approaching piano stardom in her forties. Her website gets hundreds of thousands of hits, and on a recent visit to London, she packed out the Albert Hall for performances of Chopin which, while not great, were technically adept and musically engaging.

Valentina Lisitsa(Photo: Joanna Paterson)

Lisitsa is clearly a woman of talent, spirit and determination, and though she is Ukrainian-born has been defending the Russian stance on Ukraine in remarkably forthright terms. She’s bought in to the Russian prejudice that Ukrainians are a bunch of illiterate, racist peasants, with a nasty propensity to extreme right-wing views. One of her fruitier posts shows a picture of pigs' rears with remarkably enlarged testicles, with the caption "Here are the faces of the leaders [of the Ukrainian government]". Like the propaganda churned out daily in the state-owned Russian media, she refers constantly to Ukrainian ‘Fascists’. That’s an emotive word for Russians, who refer to the Nazi invaders of the Second World War as Fascists. It is an unfortunate fact that many Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War.

All this has proved deeply embarrassing to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which had booked Lisitsa to perform Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto with the orchestra last Friday. Canada has many citizens of Ukrainian descent, and they have been making their disapproval of Lisitsa known. “Ms Lisitsa has been engaged in a long campaign on social media belittling, insulting and disparaging the people of Ukraine,” said Paul Grod, President of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. Lisitsa has been unrepentant, saying that “satire and hyperbole are the best literary tools to combat the lies.”

The matter might have rested there. “Belittling, insulting and disparaging” are not crimes – at least not yet. But “hate speech” certainly is, so when the New Jersey-based Ukrainian Weekly described Lisitsa’s tweets as “anti-Ukraine hate speech” her fate was sealed. No doubt terrified of a law-suit, the management of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra caved in. According to the Musical Toronto website, the orchestra collected all the offending tweets onto a seven-page document and sent them to Lisitsa, asking for an explanation. When she declared she stood by every word, the orchestra cancelled its contract with her, though they agree to pay her fee in full.

The Symphony’s President Jeff Melanson said: “This is not a free speech issue, but rather an issue of someone practising very intolerant and offensive expression through Twitter.” Work that one out if you can. Melanson has also declared that the orchestra’s priority “must remain on being a stage for the world’s great works of music, and not for opinions that some believe to be deeply offensive.”

Valentina Lisitsa (IMG)

This is a puzzling reason, given that when Ms Lisitsa is booked as a pianist she tends to play the piano, rather than regaling the audience with anti-Ukrainian rants. Mr Melanson has fallen into the trap of seeing a person’s offensive views on one topic as a noxious pollutant, which renders the whole person morally contagious. Because Lisitsa the political campaigner is insulting and offensive, Lisitsa the pianist must be shunned too. This is exactly the same demonising tendency that Melanson deplores in Ms Lisitsa’s views on Ukraine.

One also has to wonder how far Mr Melanson would take his self-declared policy. Let’s imagine the orchestra booked a violinist who turned out to hold stridently expressed pro-abortion and atheist views, which caused “deep insult and hurt” to pro-life Canadian Christians. Would the violinist suddenly find their contract was cancelled?

I suspect not, because even if he disagreed with the atheist violinist, Mr Melanson could claim that he "resonated with" or "sympathised with" or "was comfortable with" his or her views. This is what the declarations of high principle by artists and intellectuals so often boil down to. They make a great show of defending views they disagree with, but only if they are "comfortable" with them. But the whole point of a democracy is that it gives house-room to uncomfortable views, expressed with uncomfortably rude and satiric vigour.

What Mr Melanson fails to see is that tolerance is indivisible. You allow people to have their say, however offensive their views, and then you argue with them. If you censor those views at the outset, because they offend your delicate sensibilities, genuine freedom has already gone out of the window. "Toronto is a tolerant city," announced Mr Melanson in his recent statement. Thanks to him, it’s no longer quite as tolerant as it was.